A Swedish artist was involved in a dust-up with the local fuzz, who mistook his sculpture of a pistol loaded with steel penises for a real gun.
Bengt Andersson planned to exhibit his work at the Ronnquist gallery last week but when he opened his case to show staff the offending article, he was seized by bodyguards.
"I just …

I would ask the security agency for better trained guards

If you bother to take a look at the actual piece, then you'll find that it looks as much like a working revolver as Bob Hoskins' cartoon shooter does in "Who framed Roger Rabbit". Even at a glance.

Which isn't the bad thing; they are just a bit overprotective like this and produce false positives.

But what happens if someone walks in with an FN P90? Looks nothing like an everyday rifle and would probably, by these guys, be recognised as a battery operated precision vacuum cleaner. Or this, which could just as well be made of Semtex, C4 or the like. Would the guards be suspicious? Most likely not.

The real danger is that security guards don't get trained enough and are, more often than not, recruited from a, let's say it nicely, rather plain but overenthusiastic group of people.

Re: I would ask the security agency for better trained guards

If someone has their hands on something that looks like a gun in an area where their is a known target, I doubt any security guard would want the gun secured before anything else happens. After all, they may take down security to get to their target.

I'd rather they made mistakes on the over cautious side than the blood bath side.

Re: I would ask the security agency for better trained guards

Because I wouldn’t I would say (from the information presented to me at this time) they didn’t do their job, unless the artist told them beforehand

“ I have a bit of art that looks like a weapon, I will be bringing in this case, I will give you the case and you can open it and inspect it to ensure it is safe”.

Security Guards are taught and trained to respond quickly, this looks like a gun, that’s the point, you cannot tell me that if you saw this at a glance you would not think it’s a weapon, if it didn’t look like a gun it wouldn’t work as the art it’s supposed to be, there is a difference between looking at a close up image of something in an article telling you how the item below was mistaken for a gun, and seeing the same thing being pulled out of a case at a Security check.

There is a reason toy guns are either bright colours or have brightly coloured tips on the end, it’s so they don’t look real. If the Police and Armed forces can make these mistakes then I don’t think you can expect anyone else to somehow be better.

As for a FN90 that looks like a gun, not only does is it the same size as a gun, but it has a barrel, trigger and is the same colour as a gun, anyone who has played something like Call of Duty or seen Die Hard will even know what sound it makes, (the big blond bad guy has one if I remember right) possibly if it was disassembled, painted red and stored in a box with other metal objects that said vacuum cleaner parts on it you could get it past security, but if you pulled it out of a case at a Security check then I think you would be jumped on as equally quickly.

Re: I would ask the security agency for better trained guards

> . . .

seen Die Hard will even know what sound it makes, (the big blond bad guy has one if I remember right)

. . . <

Unlikely. "Die Hard" went into the cinemas in 1988, 2 years before FN's "Project '90(< - -hint)" was released. You most likely confuse that with a Steyr AUG, which doesn't even remotely look similar. This could explain your opinion.

Not too lethal

Re: Not too lethal

In fairness...

It is styled somewhat like a gun, no? And the guy 'planned to exhibit'the following week but perhaps hadn't thought it through, like by telling people for instance. "I'm going to open this box now, it contains a piece of at which looks like a gun so don't panic". What gallery takes submissions the week before, and would consider exhibiting a pseudo-firearm without protective measures?

To me, between the lines, modern artist thinks it'd be a wheeze to shake people up and get reaction to his teenage angst art by shocking people into taking about him. Any kicking he got was probably well deserved.

Re: In fairness...

Now I have seen a picture of it in his hand I would say it looks a lot like either a Grenade pistol or a dodgy M32 Grenade launcher without the chamber cover, or the trigger and housing part of a weapon without the barrel attached, either way it still looks like a big gun, it’s even in a gun case

@ Maharg - Re: In fairness...

No.

I don't think you have ever come closer than 50 metres to a real firearm, let alone touched one. And I don't think that you have much of an idea of how one works other than that you press the "A" button and "Z" simultaneously to reload (or whatever combination it is on your favourite console).

This might be due to being British or being 15 years old.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not berating the Brits for having no firearms. I live here myself and cope nicely now without a revolver, an automatic pistol and a pump-gun.

But a professional security guard should be able to see at a glance whether it's a weapon or not. And he should have more training than having seen "Die Hard" or played "Call of Duty" or even heard the sound that a weapon makes, no matter what colour the weapon is (as a reference to your earlier post).

These guys were supposed to be professionals, and while they were beating up an old man holding a comically oversized, skimpy-framed model penisvolver without a cylinder(!), their client was unguarded.

Re: @ andreas koch - In fairness...

@andreas koch

Ok, nice assumptions, lets go over them shall we?

You got one thing right, I am British, but I come from Northern Ireland where they have different gun laws, in fact I legally owned a number of firearms and was a member of a gun club, lets also not forget just going outside in Belfast in the 80s meant you were “closer than 50 metres to a real firearm” sometimes a large number of them, and having to make a judgment call around how jumpy the soldiers or men in the balaclavas looked before approaching a randomly set up check point, but you know, you have to go to school/work/shop And that’s even if I had never worked in a “Security” profession.

I would be quite interested to find out how many 15 year olds are actually on this site, I can’t imagine it’s that many, but add another 20 years on that and you would be a bit closer.

The point I was trying to make about playing Call of Duty or watching Die Hard is that it’s pretty common knowledge what that gun looks like, although you are right it was the Steyr, I must have got confused with that and another film with a big blonde with a dodgy accent holding an FN90, out of interest I looked it up and its been in everything from James Bond to Doctor Who, so you would think its pretty recognisable as a firearm. It’s not my fault ones you think are not that well-known have been in movies, on TV and in video games for 20 years, I bet you think people would never have heard of a MP5, or FAMAS either? Just because you know something, doesn't mean nobody else does

If you have ever seen the film Inside Man there is a quote where the cops question a witness when he tells them what type of guns they had “Of course I know what they look like, everyone who's seen a decent action movie knows what an AK-47 looks like”.

The point is, this looks like a weapon, an odd one but still a weapon, as it was pointed out, weapons come in all shapes and sizes. They would not be doing their job if they said “well it looked a bit different so I ignored it”.

Also who says they left their client unguarded? Any close protection team will have at least one person in charge of making sure the client is moved away from the threat quickly and safely, they don’t all pile on the first threat they see and leave the subject just standing there watching.

If you watch it you can see on the video they tackled him, the injuries were probably caused by his face hitting the ground, which happens when someone forces your arms to your side or behind you when they grab you, one person stays on the target while another checks the surroundings and moves a bystander away from the area, another runs from around the side of the car and gets in, replacing the position the second guy was who was shielding the person inside the car, persons one and two then drag the suspect out of the path of the car to allow the car to speed off past them, it looks like they handled that pretty well, disabled the target, insured the public didn’t get in the way or get hurt and got the client out if the area.

That looks like they did their job, if they were heavy handed then that’s not good, if they broke the law or used unwarranted force then they should be punished, but maybe next time it won’t be a bit of art and if they don’t react in the same way without hesitation people could die.

Re: @ Maharg - In fairness...

 As said above, the P90 was in Dr Who, so my 10 year old daughter would know it’s a gun (from Wiki)

“The P90 is currently in service with military and police forces in over 40 nations, such as Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Malaysia, Poland, and the United States.[13] In the United States, the P90 is in use with over 200 law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service”

A total over reaction

Re: A total over reaction

Well it could be an over-reaction - or or it could be that he's not telling us the whole story as we only have his side of it. I'm not saying that the photos are, shall we say, also an artistic work, but it occurs to me the possibility exists.

Re: A total over reaction

Swedish art moves in mysterious ways.

There was another case in Sweden recently, where a black artist made a cake in the shape of a naked black woman, invited the minister of culture to his exhibition, asked the minister to cut the cake - and when she did, freaked out about how screamingly unforgivably sexist and racist the minister was for cutting a cake shaped like a naked black woman.